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Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, I was nodding my head because this is a very new procedure to me. This is only my second day of Report stage and I rely on the knowledge and experience of other noble Lords when we find ourselves in a difficulty that I have not created.
Although it may be appropriate for me to repeat what I said in response, we have another stage of the Bill, and I shall ensure that I have dealt with every point that the noble Baroness has raised. However, I am quite sure that I specifically dealt with them.
I said that those provisions refer to people working at or for a school, but not employed by the local education authority or governing body, paid by an agency or other establishment and working under a contract of employment with those bodies to provide services at the school—precisely the group to which the noble Baroness referred—or the self-employed. We want governing bodies to be able to continue to engage or appoint such staff and to provide for
regulations to make provision for the appointment of such persons. We make it clear that schools are able to make use of staff resources in that way, outside the normal employment arrangements, with either the education authority or the governing body. I went on to say that these are technical matters and that we have had to use legal terminology in drafting these provisions.With regard to contracts of employment, we believe that the addition of the words "with the school", contained in the amendment tabled by the noble Baroness, would introduce confusion and would be inaccurate. The words may appear to clarify the meaning, but contracts of employment in this context are either with the local education authority or the governing body, depending on the category of school concerned. The governing bodies of the categories of schools under Clause 34 have traditionally never employed staff and cannot do so, and those under Clause 35 employ staff directly. We do not propose to change those arrangements, but schools are free to change categories as their governing bodies wish in order to achieve greater or lesser autonomy.
6 p.m.
Baroness Blatch: My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness for repeating that, and I am sorry that I missed it earlier in the debate. I have no objection to the notion that there must be regulations to make provision for people who work on the campus, whether employed directly or indirectly by the school. Subsection (5)(b) and other subsections in this part of the Bill refer to staff who,
- "work at a school otherwise than under a contract".
I knew that the noble Baroness was referring to third-party people who enter premises in order to work and for whom regulations must set out how they conduct themselves when on those premises. They are not working there under a direct contract with the school, which is what the wording of my amendment implies; nevertheless, they are under a contract. I believe that the wording of my amendment is in plainer English than the wording proposed by the department. However, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.
Clause 35 [Staffing of foundation, voluntary aided and foundation special schools]:
[Amendments Nos. 62 to 66 not moved.]
Clause 39 [Determination of specified budgets of LEA]:
Baroness Sharp of Guildford moved Amendment No. 67:
- Page 24, line 26, after "schools" insert "including expenditure on special educational needs support services"
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, we now move on to Clause 39 and the next section of the Bill, which concerns the determination of local authority budgets and, indeed, the ring-fencing of those budgets. In moving Amendment No. 67, I shall speak also to Amendment No. 70.
These two amendments are concerned with special educational needs. They come from the Special Educational Consortium, which has very real concerns that the increased delegation to schools, while desirable in many ways, will have a detrimental effect on special educational needs services.
In many local education authorities, the delegation of the special educational needs support services has led to their erosion. When they are delegated, it is difficult to maintain the expertise that once existed in the service. There is concern that the high levels of delegation now expected in LEAs is eroding the specialist expertise in local support services, particularly where staff from hearing impairment and visual impairment services have been absorbed into general services.
Concerns are now at such a level that a number of organisations are worried that the expertise in their specialism is threatened. The RNIB, the RNID and Sense have all expressed concern. However, this matter relates not only to services for hearing and visually impaired pupils and for speech and language-impaired pupils; it is a problem in other areas where there is an acute need to build up expertise in schools—for example, in understanding the special educational needs of pupils with autistic spectrum disorders. The National Autistic Society also shares those concerns.
Without specialist services to support and develop the capacity of schools to work with a range of pupils with special educational needs, national policy on developing effective inclusion is likely to be limited by the pace of the slowest school. We discussed that issue at length when the Special Educational Needs and Disability Bill came before the House. At that time, it was made clear that one needs to use the specialist services that are available at local education authority level or within special schools to ensure that they are available to help other schools and other teachers to develop their specialisms in this area. In so far as those specialist services are being eroded, it is far more difficult for that to happen.
This Bill proposes new ways of calculating the LEA's budget and the schools budget. The intention behind the amendment is to ensure that the funding of SEN support services is located where it will not be subject to pressures to delegate. However, there are some doubts as to whether that will really be achieved.
Amendment No. 70 relates to the overall pressure on SEN support services. There is concern about the lack of clarity in regard to the respective
responsibilities of schools and local education authorities for children with special educational needs. It is not possible to see the effect of the new regulations requiring LEAs to set out what schools are expected to fund from their delegated budget and what LEAs will fund from their retained budget. These regulations have only just come into force, and it is too soon to assess the extent to which they may be able to help to ease the situation.This amendment is modest. It would give schools a guideline for special educational needs spending. Such a guideline would, first, provide a benchmark for special educational needs spending in schools in the LEA area; secondly, it would combine with the new regulations so that schools would have a guideline on what they might purchase with their delegated budget and how much they might spend on it; and, thirdly, it would provide a basis for professional discussion between the LEA and the school about the delegated budget. All that can be done within the context of the LEA-schools relationships code of practice and its guiding principle of intervention in inverse proportion to success.
There is some feeling that Amendment No. 70 is too modest. There is a feeling that in order to stop the erosion of services and to start to build up the capacity of schools in response to the range of needs of pupils who may be placed in mainstream settings, there is a requirement for a far more radical approach to restructuring what had been the old SEN budget and a new and significant injection of funds.
Both amendments derive from the current apparent erosion of specialist expertise and doubts as to whether these budgetary arrangements will be able to stop that erosion. I beg to move.
Baroness Ashton of Upholland: My Lords, I have listened with great care to what the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, said in moving Amendment No. 67. I agree with what she said about the importance of the specialised services through which local education authorities support their schools in meeting the special needs of their pupils. I hope that I can give her the assurances which she seeks.
Final decisions on the scope of the local education authority and schools budgets have yet to be taken. However, our firm intention—I can see no reason at all to expect this to change—is that expenditure on educational psychology services and on the statutory assessment and statementing processes will be part of the local education authority budget, while other SEN expenditure will fall within the schools budget.
Moreover, while we would wish local education authorities to keep in mind the benefits of further financial delegation in the special educational needs field, we have no plans to impose any new restrictions on the purposes for which they may retain funding centrally. Under the present regulations, LEAs are permitted to fund specialist SEN support services centrally. Our intention is that they will continue to be allowed to do so under the regulations which will be made under subsection (4) of new Section 45A.
I can well understand the concerns expressed about the level of delegation. We believe that the way to address the issue of further delegation from here on is to ensure that the local education authorities' expenditure plans—whether for special educational needs or anything else—are subject to well-informed local scrutiny. That is why we want to establish separate LEA and schools budgets, each with its corresponding needs assessment against which the local education authorities' expenditure can be benchmarked. It is also why Clause 41 provides for the establishment of schools forums, whose role will include the examination of LEAs' budget plans.
In the light of the additional local scrutiny that we expect forums to provide, we believe that for most items, and certainly for special educational needs, the right balance for the future is struck by leaving the last word on whether to delegate with the LEA.
I can go further and say that, because of the additional scrutiny that we expect to be provided by forums, at present we have no plans to place LEAs under pressure to delegate funding for SEN support services by imposing limits on the total amount which they may retain centrally within the schools budget. Nor are we minded to set non-statutory targets of the kind which have been a feature of Fair Funding so far. Those targets have been valuable in raising the general level of delegation and in promoting convergence in place of the widely varying delegation levels which existed previously. We believe that the local scrutiny that school forums would provide will be sufficient to avoid the need for further delegation targets.
On the strength of those assurances, I hope that the noble Baroness will withdraw Amendment No. 67. In our view, subsection (2) in its present form already clearly enables expenditure on SEN support services to be included in a school's budget.
I understand the concerns behind Amendment No. 70. It is important that schools have a clear picture of the assumptions underlying their LEAs' funding arrangements for SEN. However, we have already taken action. LEAs must produce annual budget statements. Since 1999, those statements have to show how much of the budget generated for each school by the LEA's funding formula is notionally attributable to special educational needs. Of course such figures have limited value if schools are unclear what aspects of SEN their budgets are meant to fund. Uncertainty is most likely to arise in relation to pupils without statements. However, each LEA is required—with effect from 2002–2003—to publish a statement explaining to schools what aspects of SEN provision for non-statemented pupils they must expect to meet from their own budgets and what aspects the LEA will normally fund centrally.
We are not keen to encourage LEAs to go further in telling schools how to spend their money. SEN funding is changing, in ways discussed in the guidance document that we issued last year, The Distribution of Resources to Support Inclusion. Not only has there been a large increase in the delegation of SEN funding
but LEAs have been reconsidering the ways in which they allocate it. New funding methods are often designed to encourage schools to manage SEN resources on a whole school basis, rather than treat funding as a collection of more or less earmarked amounts. That is not just a matter of regarding a school's SEN budget itself as a totality. A whole school approach to SEN and to inclusion in general implies a readiness to deploy resources creatively, which can be inhibited if a school sees a particular amount in its budget as being exclusively for special educational needs. Too easily, that amount can be tacitly converted into a limit.
There is no reason for that approach to put pupils' interests at risk. Whether funding is delegated or not, governing bodies are under a duty to use their best endeavours to make the provision for which a child's learning difficulties call—including the provision specified in a statement. Moreover if funding is delegated for pupils with statements, LEAs can reserve the right to intervene if pupils do not receive the provision specified in their statements. In that event, the LEA can make the requisite provision itself and charge the cost to the school's budget. It is right that LEAs should have to tell schools about the SEN elements of their budgets but the substance of the amendment is reflected in existing secondary legislation.
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